Father Zossima's Final Teaching — The Brothers Karamazov

Alyosha goes into the cell with an aching heart and stands still, astonished. He had expected a sick man at his last gasp. Father Zossima is sitting up, and the monks are with him. He had promised Father Païssy one more conversation. The room is very small. Porfiry the novice stands. It is beginning to get dark, and the lamps and the candles before the icons light the room. Father Anfim is there, the companion of forty years ago, when Zossima began as a monk in a poor little monastery at Kostroma and they went together to collect alms. Zossima smiles at Alyosha in the doorway and tells him to come in. He asks, confidently and precisely, whether Alyosha has been home and seen his brother. It seems strange that he should mean only one of them, and Alyosha is not sure which. Then he understands. The elder one, the one he bowed down to yesterday. Alyosha saw him yesterday and could not find him today. Make haste to find him. Leave everything and make haste. Perhaps you may still have time to prevent something terrible. I bowed down yesterday to the great suffering in store for him. He is silent. Father Iosif and Father Païssy exchange glances. Alyosha asks what the suffering is. Do not inquire. He seemed to see something terrible yesterday, as though the whole future were expressed in the eyes.

The face Alyosha wears recalls the elder's brother Markel. Markel was eight years older, hasty and irritable, kind-hearted, never ironical. He died at seventeen. He had turned from a young man's rage against God to a radiant love in the last weeks. Life is paradise, he said, and we are all in paradise, but we will not see it. If we would, we should have heaven on earth the next day. He asked forgiveness of the birds and of the servants. Every one of us, the elder repeats, is really responsible to all men for all men and for everything. The monks weep. Alyosha's sorrow has been turned, for this hour, into joy.

The written memories go further back. His mother once sold the cook Afimya, lame and elderly, one of four serfs, for sixty paper roubles, and hired a free servant in her place. He remembers that shame. He remembers the Book of Job read in church when he was eight, the awe and the gladness, the camels, and Satan talking with God. God asked whether Satan had considered His servant Job, and boasted, pointing to that great and holy servant, and the devil laughed at God's words. There was such a glory of God all about the child, birds, trees, meadows, sky, and he lived in the middle of it and dishonoured it, and did not notice.

He tells them Joseph, the tender boy, the dreamer and prophet, sold into bondage by his brothers, who told their father that a wild beast had devoured him and showed the coat. He tells how Joseph, years later, wept and then went out joyful and said, Brothers, I am your brother Joseph. From that he turns to the village priests. Let them read the Scriptures to the peasants, simply, one hour in the week. The seed can take root in ordinary hearts. He is not giving a system. He is talking while he still can, close to death, and the talk is the teaching.